Something bugging me · 4:02am Apr 17th, 2014
Do you read the official comics? Have you gotten the latest Friends Forever, featuring Shining Armor and Twilight Sparkle? If you answered "yes" to both of those questions, you might have noticed the same thing I did.
Specifically, you might have noticed that Shiny refers to Sombra as having been "off the throne for hundreds of moons." But in what world is "hundreds of moons" a sensible way to refer to a thousand years, or to the considerably smaller amount of time that has passed from the perspective of the residents of the Crystal Empire?
Obviously, we cannot analyze this without knowing how much time a moon actually is. (And it turns out the longer I write this blog post, the less confidence I feel about the length of a moon.) The simplest path is to assume that Equestria, like Earth, has thirteen lunar cycles per year. Certainly we should take that as a likely value, but on it's own it is just an assumption. So let us delve deeper by looking at what we know about Apple Family reuinions (which happen every hundred moons) and the mirror from Equestria Girls, which opens every thirty moons.
So what do we know about family reunions from "Apple Family Reunion"? First of all, we know that a hundred moons is no small period of time; the family reunion is consistently referred to as being a rare event, and both AJ and Apple Bloom have to be reminded about what it's like even though they both appear in one of the family photos. Further, we know that AJ was a toddler at one reunion, but not at the one where the aforementioned family photo was taken; thus she is over 200 moons old. We could formulate a lot of theories to explain why AJ doesn't seem to have visibly grown since at least the last reunion, but taking into account the animation budget forces there to be only a small set of body types, and thus dictates that apparent aging be discrete, it probably doesn't actually mean much if anything. And similarly, AB looks pretty much the same, but looking at "For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils," it's easy to believe that AB could potentially have been five, or younger, in the picture and have looked the same when all we have is a small head-on view of her (especially when you take the steadily improving animation into account). It's also worth noting that, based on "Cutie Mark Chronicles," when AJ got her cutie mark (at which point she should have been about AB's current age), the set of ponies who greeted her suggests that her parents were already dead, but that AB was still fairly young; thus it is likely that AB is a little over half AJ's age. If we set AJ's age at 18 and AB's at 12, and assume 13 moons to a year, it all comes out more or less consistent (with established facts and with common fanon about ages) other than that AJ should have been AB's size at the last reunion; we need to attribute that to an animation error. Alternatively, we can assume more reunions in their past, but then it becomes unclear whether to assume shorter moons or older characters, so let's come back to that line of thought later.
Instead, let us look at Equestria Girls. For this, I'm going to be synthesizing information both from the movie and from the comic, and I don't actually have the relevant issue of the comic handy, so by all means correct me if I make a mistake. The first observation to make is that even thirty moons is a long time. The second we should establish is that Twilight would probably have been warned if time passes differently on the other side of the portal, so that's presumably not the case. If we assume that the three pictures of Sunset Shimmer with a crown indicate that she has been Princess of the Fall Formal for the last three years, then obviously that implies she has been in the human world for at least three years. And we know that Sunset Shimmer interviewed the Humane Five (I can't have been the first person to coin that, but I hope I'll be the last. It's pretty terrible) more than a month into their freshman year, and used that information as a part of her scheme to fracture the school into cliques too weak to oppose her. So we can probably assume the Humane Five are seniors at this point, since Sunset presumably did not dominate the social scene before she enacted her plot. Thus we can guess that the Humane Five, and thus the Mane Six, are most likely 17, given that is is currently early in the school year. Further, we should probably assume that Sunset would aim to take power as soon as possible, so there's a high chance that the interviews happened soon after her arrival in this world. But it's also possible that she simply was unable to transfer her influence from wherever she was before Canterlot High, forcing her to start from square one upon her arrival there from somewhere else in the human world. And then of course there's the difficulty we have in figuring out what Sunset's long-term plans actually were, since it seems unlikely that she'd know she'd ever have a chance to steal the Element of Magic. I mean, maybe she was planning to take as much time as necessary to track it down without alerting 'Tia to her presence, and she just got lucky in finding it so close, but I'm not so sure I want to accept that. Could she really be sure she could find the Elements and return in three days? I'm sure disappearing for thirty moons would mean forfeiting her position as ruler of Canterlot High. But we can also note that surely Sunset's been gone for more than three years, since Twi has been 'Tia's student for a while, and so that suggests she was somewhere else in the human world before going to Canterlot High. And then there's the fact that Sunset used to be older than Twi, but doesn't seem to be anymore . . . frankly I have killed all confidence I have in any inference.
Still, we can attack this from the other side. "Hundreds of moons" can reasonably be taken to be less than a thousand; therefore if Sombra was defeated hundreds of moons ago from Equestria's perspective, a moon is longer than a year. This makes AJ over two hundred years old, and AB over one hundred. I think we can all agree that this contradicts the fact that anything that happened a thousand years ago is remembered in vague myths if at all; a thousand years would be under two lifespans, and society does not have that short of a memory. On the other hand, "hundreds" should be at least 200, and based on evidence from "Apple Family Reunion," a hundred moons has to be at least a couple years. It surely hasn't been the minimum four or so years since Sombra's defeat for the Crystal Empire; the Empire disappeared when Sombra was locked away, and it hasn't been back for very long.
Well, if the goal was to confuse myself, I definitely succeeded.
In the world of Equestria, obviously!
Then don't use it! Each time you do, it only spreads the infection.
2018701 That implies I have the power to stop. The infection is insidious. By the time you know you've caught it, it's too late to exercise any control.